Stories

Start by understanding what makes them tick at work, says Deloitte

We’ve all had that job that never makes it to the CV or LinkedIn halls of fame.

Mine was working for Alternative Corporate Entertainment PLC or ‘ACE’, where I was tasked to sell ‘Novelty Entertainment Acts’ (NEAs) to global business monoliths from the boss’s front room in Vauxhall.

I had got dangerously close to placing faux 1970s teddy boy schlock ‘n’ rollers, Showaddywaddy, at the Reuters Fleet Street 1989 Christmas party, before their Brummie agent shot me down with the ultimate reality check as I tried to knock him down on fees:

“Listen son, if you want Under the Moon of Love on a stick you’ll have to cough up with the readies; these fellas are a bit long in the tooth for all of this jam-for-tomorrow bullshit.”

I remember putting down the phone, lighting up a cigarette, with my feet now on the table and drawing deeply on a Marlboro Red before saying to my boss, “The corporate entertainment world is not for me, I’m going to Brazil, I quit.” I was 22 and I’d been in the role a grand total of three-and-a-half days.

My next job lasted a good deal longer in the Southern Hemisphere and then a timeline of two-year workhopping stints throughout my twenties and early thirties, before the stabilising influence of marriage, kids, mortgages, pensions, staycations, mortality.

Deloitte’s fifth global Millennial Survey of hipsters’ hopes and dreams paints a picture of an emerging decision-making workforce who have not so much one eye on the door as one foot out of it. The management consultancy firm warns of an emerging epidemic of what it calls ‘loyalty challenge’.

Out of the 7,700 participants born after 1982 from 29 countries, one in four of the buggers are planning ‘near-term exits’ from their current employers. The days of working the way up the greasy corporate pole is so last century, with a stonking 82% of Peruvian under-34-year-olds saying they will be doing a ‘Paddington Bear’ and leaving their current organisation within the next five years.

And it’s not just emerging nations where the workhopping bug is biting deep, in the UK 71% of the same demographic said their five-year plan included a career move.

There’s a great Urban Dictionary quote which says Millennials believe ‘themselves to be overachievers who just aren’t understood by their loser bosses’. This superiority complex seems to be borne out in the Deloitte data with six in ten of them complaining their “leadership skills are not being fully developed.”

It looks like employers aren’t doing enough to bridge the gap between outgoing workhoppers and incoming workhoppees, and neglecting their responsiblity of ensuring a new generation of business leaders.

The elephant the Deloitte research elegantly leaves lingering in the room, near the retro Shoreditch standard lamp, is the potential drop-out rates of 18-34-year-olds who decide to spin out of the traditional job market altogether, with life outweighing work.

The research comes close to annunciating the emerging slacker phenomenon when approaching the subject of flexible working, striking a balance.

Central to the issue of flexible working is the mobile phone. According to the survey 70% were able to access email and relevant applications from mobile devices with less of them able to work flexible hours and only 43% of them being allowed to work from home or other locations.

This current level of flexibility is not consistent with Millennials’ desires with 88% wishing they could start and finish work at the times they choose – while 77% of them wish to have greater mobile connectivity via tablets and smartphones, with a view to working remotely more frequently – with the belief they will be more productive.

It’s the WFH metric which would increase levels of satisfaction and in this generation’s opinion, boost productivity; 51% of them expected productivity to increase if people in their organisations could work from home or outside of the workplace at least.

That warm and fuzzy ‘freedom’ feeling loops back into the loyalty challenge, where most of the survey respondents expressed that if they felt more in control of their careers, they would feel more empowered and would therefore stick around longer.

All the insights need to be read in the context of a missing variable, which is that work/life balance comes before career progression ONLY when salary and other financial benefits are removed from the research dialogue. A bit like the insight gleaned from Showaddywaddy’s agent all those years ago, I guess.

Last week I realised the true value of being a follower when I discovered an amazing story by Hillsborough survivor, Adrian Tempany, after it was promoted in a tweet by sportswriter David Conn.

It was 5,000 words long, which meant a lot of iPhone thumbscrolls on a Sunday afternoon when I should have been helping with the washing-up. But even the clear and present danger of a domestic bollocking couldn’t stop me from reading the whole piece, crying a bit, en-scroll.

In an offline format, if you were to include the usual print furniture of headlines, photos, captions, breakouts, adverts – the piece would have been a 7-8 page spread.

I’m a painfully slow reader so absorbing this body of content end to end probably took me the best part of 30 minutes or 1,800 seconds to imbibe.

In audience research parlance, I am what is known as a ‘hyper-engaged user’, a news-reading zealot who can be relied upon to deliver the big minutes that ad sales teams use in pitches to ensure the content vessel stays afloat.

According to the latest reading-habit research from the Pew Research Center, I index by 567% above the average time a mobile visitor in their cohort spends on 5,000+ word stories. But here’s the thing – not many of them ever get to the end of a longform article on a smartphone, however hyper-engaged.

Mister Tempany’s editorial odyssey of the collective grief shared by Merseyside friends and families over the unlawful killing of 96 of their loved ones at a football match inspired me to shoot the the link to a handful of mates with the imperative, ‘READ THIS’.

Random chats with these pals through the week elicited their feedback, which corroborated the Pew research; not one of them had finished the article, although they had all tried and read ‘quite lot of it’. This further corroborates the research which says that the more words an article has on a smartphone or tablet, the more invested the visitor will be in that content.

There were elements of the research which were uncorroborated, like the notion that reading habits depend on where the reader has come from, digitally speaking.

A content punter, they say, who starts a longform piece from an internal link, spends an average of 148 seconds, compared to the social media blow-ins who fritter a mere 111 seconds of their attention to the narrative.

My experience was much less cut and dried, if not diametrically opposed to the Institute’s insights. I was under the social media influence of a tweet from a writer not a media owner.

… this awareness-raising tweet induced me to read the piece from start to finish, something I would not have done in my natural clickstream behaviour on the Guardian website.

In my more self-critical moments I ponder whether my lack of gravitas or credibility is the reason why my friendorsement of the same article lacked the same velocity.

There’s a powerful message to media owners and their protagonists around the value of online content and it being seriously diminished, if the author is ignored or taken for granted.

The Adrian Tempany piece is Ulyssean in its form and its content. In a data-driven, performance-centric media environment – it’s tempting to somehow bow to the wisdom of machines and metrics, not forgetting the incisive research from respected think-tanks like Pew – the risk is we prohibit the human who conveys the human to the human and that’s what advertisers really want, if you follow me.

Tim Cook will have woken to the news that Facebook has tripled its advertising revenues.

The news has stunned Wall Street in much the same way that Apple’s revenue-drop news, 24 hours previously, had shocked the media world. The surprise came despite an apparent expectation management exercise, masterminded by mister Cook in January.

Apple soothsayers and naysayers are currently pondering the significance of recent fiscal reports which frame Apple’s fortunes by a 10-million unit drop in iPhone shipments.

In the first analysis it would seem absurd to liken the potentially emerging negative Apple trend to the dystopian destiny of, say Nokia – especially given the Cupertino giant’s cash mountain of $233bn – a little more than Finland’s total GDP.

The reason for the sales slump is widely attributed to the company grappling with the Chinese economy, where the mass market consumer can’t afford a £50 smartphone.

It’s all going to be fine though, according to mister Cook who proclaimed with an Old Testament-like zeal ‘This Too Shall Pass’ – after the company lost over $40 billion in its value.

Flashback to Nokia, it’s 2003 and a 14-strong Nokia account garrison march into a mobile phone operator sales meeting to reveal its worst kept secret, the 18-month product roadmap. It contained the usual kooky Finnish faves: phones that looked like spaceships, phones that aped miss-shaped boxes of chocolates and not one touchscreen phone among them.

When the Espoo troops were asked why they serially resisted the new touchscreen tendency that was showing up in all consumer research across demographics, cultures, ethnicity they dismissed it as a blip. Their research indicated the mobile phone market was still fundamentally about fashion i.e. colour, form, shape – the consumer wanted cameras not touchscreens!

Posturing and denials like this signposted the unravelling of the much-loved Nokia brand. Even though there were short-term heydays ahead, like the launch of the fantastically fast and powerful internet-friendly, N95, Nokia revenues started to decline irretrievably when Steve Jobs heralded the advent of the touchscreen in 2007.

Mediacells’ analysis of the revenue cycle peaks for both Nokia and Apple shows immense growth which, in Nokia’s case at least, culminated in terminal decline in a market where new competitors, like Apple, began to define a new mobile narrative.

Mobile was no longer about fashion and fancy, it was about lifestyle companionship and smartphone behaviours finally evolved to include constant app and internet usage.

The future of the iPhone is to some extent out of Tim Cook’s hands, the strong macro-economic headwinds blowing from the East are impossible for the West, let alone Apple to shield from. But Apple does need to come up with a radical new innovation programme rather than just the current incremental improvements to existing products.

There was a ‘Nokia moment’ when the roadmap rumour started circulating around the iPhone 7. It would include a redesigned home button, proprietary headphone port, and a dust and water-proof jacket. Is this enough for an iPhone 6s customer to upgrade – to change the fundamental way I navigate my iPhone and plug myself into my music even if it will survive a toilet dive?

There’s a step change missing in the Apple product roadmap, somewhere between underwhelming product launches, like the smartwatch, to the Wall Street whispers of life-changing future products, like electric cars and virtual reality hardware.

Facebook, Spotify and YouTube are already delivering content on what some tech pundits and twonks are calling the fourth, even fifth screen. It could be on the dashboard of a car, on a smartwatch, a cooker, a TV or even in a smart shower.

This internet of stuff can’t rely on a piece of hardware – that would make it far too emotional if it were ever to get lost, broken, infected or stolen. Quite literally, the key to our future everyday lives would need to be completely reset.

As Tim Cook promises a product pipeline with ‘amazing innovations in store’, expectations are perhaps being set instead of managed.

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